‘Plug & Play’ Software for US Defense Drones

SANTA MONICA, Calif. --- DreamHammer, creator of Ballista, the first commercial multi-drone operating system, announced today that it has recently completed a series of successful demonstrations with the U.S. Defense Department (DoD) and UAS prime contractors.

These demonstrations proved that Ballista’s “out-of-the-box” support of the UCS (UAS Control Segment) architecture allowed it to “plug & play” with current and future unmanned aircraft also supporting UCS within the Defense Department.

Ballista, by virtue of its open architecture, already has the ability to integrate with any proprietary UAS, allowing a single operator to simultaneously manage multiple unmanned vehicles. Ballista’s support of UCS now opens its commercial customers to “plug & play” with the U.S. defense market.

“Currently, the DoD has the world’s largest UAS fleet and the greatest need for affordability, therefore it was key to our customers to prove Ballista’s ability to meet the UCS interoperability standards out of the box,” said Nelson Paez, CEO of DreamHammer. “We believe strongly that by supporting this standard the industry can begin to create the universal interoperability of drones which will enable the explosive growth of drones in both the government and commercial markets. Drones will be everywhere and used for everything whether for military or commercial purposes. By supporting UCS, drone manufacturers and developers using Ballista will have access to an annual $6.6 billion market.”

Ballista comes prepackaged with open and extensible UCS-conforming models, middleware communications and user interface components. These components allow non-UCS-based systems (both legacy and standards-based) to integrate their proprietary hardware and services into Ballista, bringing them up to the UCS standard and allowing them to interoperate with other UCS-based vehicles, sensors and services.

“The UCS standard has defined an architectural model and business practices that promote maximum interoperability allowing vendors to weave their unique capabilities into unmanned aircraft control systems,” said Chris Diebner, CTO of DreamHammer. “By making Ballista UCS conformant out of the box, we are offering a plug & play platform for vendors and customers to quickly bring their capabilities to market.”

DreamHammer plans to provide out-of-the-box support for other global unmanned standards such as STANAG 4586, MAVlink, and JAUS, in addition to other cross-domain standards in future releases.